Of Monument and Moment: Huma Bhabha's Cinema of Decay by Susan Canning

Huma Bhabha often cites the influence of Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, a work that, like her own, achieves its dramatic effect by joining monumentality and spectacle. Just as there are many ways of seeing Rodin’s tragic yet heroic burghers, Bhabha’s sculptures and installations defy fixed perspectives, their narrative fluidity forming, in almost cinematic fashion, a continuous loop of representation and association. Combining the formal concerns of Modernist sculpture with the expressive dynamism of film, Bhabha serves as both maker and director, creating skillfully edited pieces that entangle the body and eye in a conundrum of permanence and dissolution, monument and moment.